Apple is betting on a vision that is different from Google’s, a world where the data lives in the cloud but access to it is hidden behind native apps. You don’t need a web browser to get the impression that your data is always there for you, no matter where you are and which device you use. For iCloud, Mac OS and iOS are equals. The cloud just works, to the extent that you shouldn’t even notice that it is there. Good news for Cocoa developers.

Another learning: Objective-C is very much alive and kicking. Apple seems totally committed to the language, and the switch to LLVM is a huge thing for the future improvement of the language. More good news for Cocoa developers.

In My Fear of Middleware, Noel Llopis makes a great case against using frameworks like Cocos2D in game development. If you have an excellent grasp of the language and the technology you’re working with, all-encompassing libraries can sometimes hinder you more than they help. On the other hand, a framework like Cocos2D can save you tons of work if you’re a beginner. It all depends on the situtation.

David Singleton: Why mobile apps suck when you’re mobile. Good explanation why TCP connections can suck so badly when used over a bad mobile link. Includes suggestions to improve your own networking code.

Kelly Sommers turned her Continuous Client concept I mentioned last month into an impressive cross-platform demo. No matter whether your immediate goal is something similar or not, a messaging-based approach to component design in your app seems like a good idea.

The thing is this, and it’s an important thing — always bet on the technologies that scale. … Apple is now betting that multiple applications maintaining their own connections to disparate servers will end up performing poorly on mobile devices. I believe they’re right.

Components and Libraries

Dave DeLong wrote DDMathParser, an extensible parser for mathematical expressions.

Another interesting parsing library is Tom Davie’s CoreParse. It allows you to write your own tokenizer and parser with very little effort.

The guys at enormego wrote EGOTextView, a rich text editor alternative for UITextView. Unfortunately, the included demo app doesn’t really show off any rich text formatting features. The code looks good, though.

Kyle Neath shares the design process of the new GitHub app for Mac. It is an interesting account from a newcomer to both designing and developing Cocoa apps that helps to illustrate some of the weak points of AppKit and a lot of the cruft that has accumulated in AppKit over the years. Not all of his criticism is justified in my opinion. Interface Builder pretty useless? Come on. And:

Along those same lines, I think that Cocoa is dying for a framework. Something that weighs on the simple defaults side rather than complex code generation side.

What does this even mean? Cocoa is the framework. And the simple defaults are (among other things) the standard UI controls. You can build your own ff you don’t want to use the defaults, but you will have to work harder.

App Store

Apple backpedaled on the strict in-app subscription rules they introduced in February. There is no longer a requirement that external content be offered through in-app purchase at all and at the same price or less than outside an app. This is a very welcome change before the June 30 deadline expired that Apple had set developers to comply with the rules.

With iA Writer for Mac as the example, Dan Wineman reminds us of a useful lesson when pricing our own apps: don’t try to commoditize your own product just because Apple does something similar. Apple is playing a different game. Oliver Reichenstein from Information Architects expands on this and compares the performance of iA Writer on the Mac App Store to the iOS App Store. Key finding: the two ecosystems are two very different beasts.

David Heinemeier Hansson argues that ten apps is all he needs; competitors shouldn’t need a massive App Store to compete with Apple if they do the basic apps that everybody uses really well. David Barnard has a very good reply with The Eleventh App: every single user might only use a small number of apps but at least some of these apps will be different from person to person.

Competition

Battleheart developers Mika Mobile offer an interesting comparison of their app’s performance on the iOS App Store and the Android Market: Part 1, Part 2. Monetization on iOS is still a lot stronger but Android seems to be catching up, especially considering that they found it to be easier to get high into the top charts on the Android Market.

Community

Marcus Zarra sees a growing trend in the Cocoa developer community to unfairly criticize the work of others without knowledge of or respect for both the people involved and the constraints projects are under: Why So Serious? Marcus’s specific example is the bashing that the The Daily app (where he was involved in the development) received by many.

Gone is the sharing and the live/let live attitude that once made this community so great. Quite a few members are just full of piss and vinegar. … What saddens me is this new desire to attack things that are either new or just in the media. Does the application suck? Maybe. But to curse the developers who wrote it? Not cool.

I can’t say I agree with him but this is definitely something everybody should look out for.

Brent Simmons sold NetNewsWire, one of the best-known indie Mac and iOS apps. In a long interview on Daring Fireball, Brent and Black Pixel’s Daniel Pasco discuss the reasons and NetNewsWire’s future. Very insightful.

The Appsterdam community officially kicked off their project with a big launch event. I hope they can keep up the enthusiasm and find many imatators in other cities around the world. Anything that improves the community spirit is good for all of us.